"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Friday, July 29, 2016

Is This Finally The End Of Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Malevolent Career In Politics?

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Not high profile anymore-- at least not on TV

Before they changed the locks at the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was allowed in the building to address the staff she had hired and who helped her rig the primaries for Bernie (and use the DNC resources, illegally, for her own re-election efforts in South Florida). Many of them will soon be looking for new jobs. Here's the inspiring message the vulgar, contemptible and corrupt Wasserman Schultz gave them:

"And all those scumbags who are giving you shit on social media? Fuck them, they don't know the first thing. They don't know you."

What an inspiring leader, who just led her troops... right into annihilation? Or is she bringing them to her new job as head of Hillary's 50 state something or other, which, if it's a real job, will guarantee one thing: President Trump. Wasserman Schultz, long known throughout both Tallahassee and DC as a pillar of breathtaking corruption who would wind up behind bars one day, has more recently been widely exposed as the very picture of breathtaking incompetence. As Politico made clear yesterday, "the dysfunction within the DNC had been mounting for months... Wasserman Schultz accentuated an existing divide with Amy Dacey, who as committee CEO was supposed to have control over all operations. She was often left out of the loop of decisions by the chair’s staff, sometimes leading to contradictory plans. 'One hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing,' lamented one state party chair."

[T]he DNC was veering off the rails just as the presidential election was heating up. More than a dozen people inside the party apparatus, speaking in the wake of Wasserman Schultz’s resignation on Sunday, describe an internal culture in which few felt they could challenge an increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions.Last week’s WikiLeaks dump, releasing thousands of emails showing DNC officials sparring with Bernie Sanders supporters and with one another, was what finally got Hillary Clinton’s top aides to force her out Sunday on the eve of the convention.Now, all DNC senior staffers seem to believe they’re on the verge of being fired-- and that’s before the next WikiLeaks release, which many fear is coming within days, and which DNC lawyers are bracing for. Several staff members have already been asked to prepare statements about their departures.Staff members were briefed in a Tuesday afternoon meeting in Washington that their personal data was part of the hack, as were Social Security numbers and other information for donors, according to people who attended. Don’t search WikiLeaks, they were told-- malware is embedded throughout the site, and they’re looking for more data....“This [WikiLeaks release] didn’t peel back all the layers of the onion of incompetence,” said one person inside the DNC. “But it broke the fever.”Neither the White House nor Clinton’s campaign made the moves to oust her earlier for fear of an untimely blow-up. Her support of the Iran deal and the Trans Pacific Partnership helped keep the West Wing from going too hard at her. But senior aides to Clinton and President Barack Obama had long out ago run of patience with what they saw as her attempts to constantly insert herself and clumsily try to ingratiate herself at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.“It was an inch-by-inch battle for everything, and Debbie didn’t make it easy-- not because she was trying to stay neutral, but because she was trying to maintain control,” said one person familiar with DNC operations.Wasserman Schultz refused, without direct explanation at the time, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s request to have three members of Congress testify at the first party platform committee meeting in early June, leading Pelosi to clear her schedule that day and show up herself to speak about House Democratic priorities.When Obama agreed to do a DNC fundraiser in Miami in June-- and in the end, went out of his way in his public remarks to talk about why Wasserman Schultz needed to be reelected in his public remarks-- she for weeks hassled White House political director David Simas to get 10 of the 60 seats (which went for $10,000 each) at the event for her congressional reelection campaign’s biggest donors. She ended up filling the seats, according to people involved with planning the event, with family and friends....Frustration within the DNC, the White House and the Clinton campaign was exacerbated by Wasserman Schultz’s efforts to raise her own profile by appearing more often on national television.Luis Miranda, the communications director whom Wasserman Schultz hired last September, pitched her hard in their interview on how he would get her on TV more often. He got the job over two candidates who were recommended by the Clinton campaign.“The biggest problem with the communications department right now is that we don’t put Debbie out there enough,” Miranda said at his first staff meeting after coming on board in September, according to people in the room....But Wasserman Schultz’s increased television activity increased her problems. After the raucous Nevada state convention in May, she went on the attack against Sanders and his supporters, and an enraged Sanders responded by calling for her resignation.Just at the point when Democratic leaders were hoping to shift toward more party unity, she’d inflamed the situation and put herself in the middle of it.“The people who were willing to look the other way stopped looking the other way,” said another person familiar with DNC operations.She sometimes failed to show up at headquarters to make donor calls, or stay for long when she did. Key staffers couldn’t find her after her personal staff had stopped sending her schedule to all but two top staffers, which the DNC spokesperson said was due to security concerns as the email hack was being investigated.
More and more, the DNC staff, the White House and the Clinton campaign simply wrote her off.“There was nothing we could do with her, so we just stopped pretending,” another DNC staffer said. “She became so ineffective for the building that we just stopped using her.”

Although she was ordered to not show her face in Philly, she was still there as of yesterday, "attending events day and night with her police escort, and having her assistant reach out aggressively to donors [for herself], urging them to see her in her suite at the Wells Fargo Center, her base while in town." Meanwhile, the DCCC has signaled that they don't plan to help rescue her floundering reelection campaign from a fired-up, ascendent activist and union base around Tim Canova. According to Roll Call, DCCC Chair Ben Ray Ben Ray Luján said she shouldn't be expecting any financial help from them. He told her to work hard and "reach out to the voters back home."
As of the June 30, FEC filings, she had raised $3,072,629, spent $1,832,788 and had $1,602,353 cash-on-hand. According to her chief political operative, Steve Paikowsky, the corrupt Sugar Empire run by the Fanjuls, has agreed to spend a million dollars on TV smearing Canova. Canova has raised $2,262,482, spent $1,276,137 and had $986,345 on hand. Please help him overcome Wasserman Schultz's advantage by tapping on the thermometer on the right. 76% of Tim's contributions come from small donations while only 23% of Wasserman Schultz's haul comes from small donors. Most of her campaign contributions are strictly pay-to-play. Her biggest single contributor so far this cycle is Comcast. She's notorious for taking money from booze companies (in return for her opposition to medical marijuana), from the private prison industry, from polluters, from lobbyists and from pay day lenders (which is how she got the nickname #DebtTrapDebbie). Ironically, Canova's single biggest contribution came from the Communication Workers of America, the union that was locked in a life or death struggle with Wasserman Schultz's Comcast bandits.I started warning progressives groups about Rahm Emanuel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz in 2006. Few Virtually none were interested in hearing the evidence. It took almost a decade for progressive thought leaders to finally turn on Wasserman Schultz-- slightly less time to turn on Rahm. Today the same type of groups are ignoring my warnings about Chuck Schumer, who I've known since 1963 and who is far more dangerous to the progressive movement than either Emanuel or Wasserman Schultz. Replacing Wasserman Schultz on August 30 with Tim Canova will send a message beyond Broward and Miami-Dade counties. It will send a message that Democrats can do to crooks like Wasserman Schultz what the Republicans were smart enough to do to Eric Cantor. Just belongs in the same trash heap that he's in. Please help Tim with his difficult task. Most of the Democratic crooks (and most of the Republican crooks) don't even have plausible primary opponents. That's why we have to get behind real leaders like Canova and like Alan Grayson-- currently being aggressively smeared by Schumer and the worst of the media clowns. Heroic leaders like Canova and Grayson-- not to mention Bernie-- don't grow on trees and the establishment will do anything to destroy them.

UPDATE: Debbie Has Aroused A Lot Of AngerA regular DWT reader and Blue America contributor in Weston, the heart of Debbie territory-- some even call her the "Wicked Witch of Weston"-- sent this in today and asked us to publish it.

A lesson of DWS’s downfall is that, to sustain a political rise:You can love yourself, money and grudges
and love to show off,
but you can’t show off
your love of yourself, money and grudges.The Spice of Lies: Debbie might not lie much more than Trump, Hillary, Bill or Barack, but she she does it with none of:

Don't let sleep-walking Blue Dogs lie! Do Democrats require more than money and name-recognition in their elected officials? This will be put to the test in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s August 30 primary contest with knowledgeable, articulate and public-spirited law professor (and expert on trade agreements and bank regulation) Tim Canova.